TOP OF MIND TODAY…

► As CNN reports, Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign could take a YUGE step forward this week:

America may get its most intimate look yet inside Robert Mueller’s secretive Russia investigation in the next four days, with a series of disclosures that have the potential to be greatly damaging for President Donald Trump.

Court filings focusing on Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, on Tuesday and his ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Friday could offer tantalizing new details of Mueller’s deep dive into the 2016 campaign.

If the special counsel lives up to his reputation, his filings will feature surprising revelations and rich texture to color the picture he has already painted in indictments and witness testimony of a culture of endemic dishonesty in Trump’s orbit about multiple, so far unexplainable, ties with Russians…

…Stepping up the pace of his probe since the midterm elections, Mueller has moved in a direction that appears increasingly threatening to the President, including his crossing of Trump’s red line by showing interest in his family real estate empire.

► President Trump’s Twitter habit may be crossing new lines in relation to Mueller’s special investigation. From the Washington Post:

Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that the most striking thing about Monday was that there were two statements in proximity.

“It comes very close to the statutory definition of witness tampering,” he said. “It’s a mirror image of the first tweet, only he’s praising a witness for not cooperating with the implication of reward,” he said, adding that Trump has pardon power over Stone.

“We’re so used to President Trump transgressing norms in his public declarations,” Eisen said, “but he may have crossed the legal line.”

This begs the question: Which social media platform is the most effective for witness tampering?

► Nic Garcia of the Denver Post manages to write an entire story about a Democratic majority in the state legislature without actually quoting any, you know, Democrats.

► The Washington Post has the latest on an important election fraud case in North Carolina in which a Republican operative is being accused of collecting absentee ballots and only submitting those that included a vote for his preferred Republican candidate:

The possibility that November’s vote will be tossed out has prompted an eruption of partisan accusations. The case is politically fraught for Republicans, who in North Carolina and across the country have pushed for voter-identification laws and other restrictions while warning without evidence about the threat of rampant voter fraud, particularly by immigrants in the country illegally…

…Investigators with the bipartisan state elections board — which last week voted unanimously to delay certifying the race — have identified hundreds of potential witnesses to interview, many of them voters whose absentee ballots were never turned in, according to the people familiar with the probe. That raises the possibility of a weeks-long investigation and an uncertain start date for the next congressman from the 9th District.

► The Washington Post details Republican efforts to weaken Democratic power in states where the GOP lost important races in November:

Outgoing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker…is working with Republicans in the legislature to rush through a bill, which could come to the floor as early as today, that would significantly reduce the power of Gov.-elect Tony Evers (D), as well as the incoming Democratic attorney general. It would also ratchet back early voting, which has increased minority participation and benefited Democrats. Hundreds protested at the State Capitol in Madison last night as a committee markup dragged on until midnight…

…It’s not the only arrow being shot this autumn into the notion of an orderly transfer of power. In Michigan, for example, the Republican-controlled legislature is considering measures in its lame-duck session to limit the power of incoming Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. One proposal would let the legislature intervene in legal cases when the AG won’t. Social conservatives complain that Nessel pledged on the campaign trail that she would not defend a 2015 state law that allows adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Another bill under consideration would take oversight power over campaign finance matters away from the independently elected secretary of state and put it under a commission where each party would get to pick three members, according to the Detroit News. It is no coincidence that the GOP is pursuing this only after Michigan elected its first Democratic secretary of state since 1994.

As the Post notes, what Republicans are doing is akin to changing the rules of a game after a loss in order to make it easier to win the next round.

► Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won a special runoff election in Mississippi last week, but as Matthew Rozsa writes for Salon, Democrats may have learned some important lessons for running candidates in the Southern U.S.

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Effective take-down of a Centennial Institute report on the effects of legalization of pot on REASON's website The conclusion:

[Centennial Institute Director Jeff] Hunt claims the report is "fair" and takes "a conservative approach to calculating the costs and fees associated with increased marijuana use." In reality, it does not even attempt to calculate the costs associated with increased marijuana use. At best, it calculates the costs associated with marijuana use, period, and the manner in which it does that will not seem fair to anyone who does not already agree with Hunt that legalization is a huge mistake.

a group called No Labels has embodied a particular approach to politics and policy in Washington, D.C.; it’s one that insists the real problems are partisanship, divisiveness, and incivility, and that if only sensible centrists from both parties could be brought together under the right conditions, the halcyon days of the past will return.

Yet curiously, the sensible solutions so often proposed by No Labels and its ilk have an uncanny likelihood of benefiting one particular element of our nation’s political economy: the superrich, or more precisely, the finance industry.

A new report on Monday from the Daily Beast adds a sweeping array of details to what many long knew or suspected about this movement, which allegedly wants to remain above the fray: It’s funded by the barons of hedge funds and private equity.